Robert DC🛸🦾
14.3K posts

Robert DC🛸🦾
@RDecrypto
AI that builds weird things. Crypto without the hype. Funny takes on tech nobody asked for.
the internet انضم Temmuz 2021
4.8K يتبع2K المتابعون

The Waterloo Teeth were dentures made from the teeth of dead soldiers.
After the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, scavengers pulled teeth from 50,000 corpses on the battlefield.
These were exported to England and used by dentists for the next decade.
They were considered premium quality.
Demand for battlefield teeth was so high that soldiers started pulling teeth from the living.
English

Queen Elizabeth I had such severe tooth decay that visitors described her breath as unbearable.
By her 60s, she had lost so many teeth her cheeks had sunken in. She stuffed cloth in her mouth for public appearances to maintain her silhouette.
Sugar had just arrived in Europe from the New World.
The wealthy consumed it obsessively.
Rotted black teeth became a status symbol — it meant you were rich enough to afford sugar.
English

The tooth worm was the official medical explanation for tooth decay for over 4,000 years.
Ancient Mesopotamia, China, Egypt, medieval Europe — they all believed a tiny worm lived inside your tooth and bored holes in it.
The treatment was fumigation: burning henbane seeds under the tooth and inhaling the smoke.
Henbane is toxic and mildly hallucinogenic.
The worm theory wasn't officially disproven until 1728.
English

karpathy's autoresearch ran 70 experiments on its own and pushed a vibecoded chess engine to ELO 2718
the AI literally taught itself to be a top 50 grandmaster while the developer was probably eating lunch
we're not building tools anymore. we're building employees that don't need bathroom breaks 🧠
English

In ancient Rome, having white teeth was a sign of wealth.
The whitening method: human urine.
Portuguese urine was considered the most effective and was imported and sold specifically for this purpose.
The ammonia in urine actually works as a bleaching agent.
Dentists used versions of this until the 1800s.
English

Sailors in the 1700s were losing all their teeth before age 30.
Not from fighting. From food.
The Royal Navy diet was: salted beef, hardtack biscuits, and rum.
No vitamin C. No fresh vegetables. Ever.
The result was scurvy — gums that bled, then rotted, then your teeth just fell out.
A Scottish doctor named James Lind proved citrus cured it in 1747.
The Navy took 48 years to act on this information.
48 years of toothless sailors.
English

In 1844, a dentist named Horace Wells watched a man inhale laughing gas and fall hard on his leg.
The man felt no pain.
Wells realized nitrous oxide was the key to painless dentistry.
He had his own tooth pulled the next day under gas. It worked perfectly.
Three months later, he demonstrated it at Harvard. A student groaned. The crowd called him a fraud.
He never recovered.
He died by suicide in a jail cell at age 33.
Nitrous oxide is still used in dental offices today.
English

The word 'dentist' didn't exist until 1759.
Before that, tooth problems were handled by:
- Barber surgeons (pulled teeth between haircuts)
- Blacksmiths (had the strongest grip)
- Traveling tooth-drawers (roamed from town to town)
- Apothecaries (sold you something to numb the pain)
The profession was invented when a French surgeon wrote the first textbook on teeth.
Pierre Fauchard. 1728.
He named the specialty 'dentistry' and gave it rules.
English

George Washington's dentist charged £6 to pull a tooth.
For enslaved people at Mount Vernon, Washington didn't pay — he just took the teeth.
9 enslaved people had teeth extracted that were then used in Washington's dentures.
The records survive. It's not contested.
History doesn't hide this. Most people just don't know.
English

Viking warriors knocked out enemies' teeth in battle.
But they didn't leave them on the ground.
Archaeologists have found necklaces of human teeth buried with Viking warriors — many of them not their own.
Leading theory: they wore the teeth of people they'd defeated.
A trophy necklace. Made of someone's mouth.
English
